Diego Solano-Brenes

University of São Paulo | USP · Department of Ecology (IB)

Courtship and copulation behaviours are yet scantily described in many spider families, and this lack of information limits our understanding of the evolution of such behaviours within and across families. Here, we provide a detailed description of both courtship and copulation behaviour for Oecobius concinnus Simon, 1893. A striking characteristic...

Behavior is often phylogenetically informative and detailed descriptions of behavior have been used to support taxonomic relationships in several groups, such as birds, lizards, and arthropods. Web building behavior has provided informative traits to several spider families, but observations are lacking for other families, such as wall spiders Oeco...

Background When males are selective, they can either reject low-quality females or adjust their reproductive investment in response to traits that indicate female quality (e.g., body size or condition). According to the differential allocation hypothesis , males increase their reproductive investment when paired with high-quality females ( positive...

Nest‐site selection is a crucial decision made by parents because inadequate sites may expose the offspring and the parent to harsh abiotic and biotic conditions. Although nest‐site selection has been reported for some species of arthropods, the proximate cues used by parents to select the nest site and the adaptive meaning of nest‐site selection a...

Many orb-weaving spiders break the central lines of the hub at the end of web construction. Nevertheless, very little is known of how spiders break these lines and whether this behaviour differs among taxa. Here, we describe details of how Leucauge mariana (Taczanowski, 1981) breaks the central lines of the hub. Breaking hub lines varies among indi...

In nest-building species, offspring survival and reproductive success of parental individuals are strongly influenced by nest quality. Thus, quantifying the influence of abiotic conditions on nest integrity is important to predict the effects of weather variability on the fitness of parental individuals. Here, we investigated how rainfall affects n...

The evolution of exclusive paternal care in arthropods is influenced by both natural and sexual selection. Male care may simultaneously increase egg protection against natural enemies and male attractiveness to ovipositing females. When caring males desert or die, their clutches may be adopted either by females that provide flexible compensation of...

The characteristics and designs of webs provide valuable information on ecology, behavior and phylogenetic relationships. Characters are often obtained from detailed analyses of web photographs. We describe new methods to enhance web visibility; they consisted of painting the inner surfaces of Petri dishes with an opaque black spray paint that prod...

Among orchid bees that have been observed, nest initiation by multiple females is rare, and has never been reported from an aerial-nesting species. Here, we document nest initiation by multiple females in the aerial-nesting Euglossa cybelia. Observations were carried out on five nests, which were found on the undersides of understory palm leaves in...

When two mating tactics can be successfully used by different-sized males, disruptive selection may favour morphological divergence between males, resulting in intrasexual dimorphism. Here we characterize intrasexual dimorphism based on cheliceral size in males of the harvestman Paecilaemula lavarrei. We also describe how males of the two morphs us...

The final instar larvae of the koinobiont ectoparasitoids in the Polysphincta group of genera induce their host spiders to construct webs that protect the wasp pupa during its development. It has been hypothesized that changes in structure and design in the cocoon web correlate with the duration and characteristics of the normal web. Kapogea cyrtop...

How efficient is paternal care against egg predation in a tropical rainforest? Since females remain in the vicinity of the nests, do they help caring for the eggs?